Feature

Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas

In a little-recounted episode of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent
design trial, the plaintiffs (objecting to a four-paragraph statement read
in biology class) summoned a curious expert witness: John F. Haught, former
chair of Georgetown University’s theology department. Asked to identify
the antecedents of intelligent design, Professor Haught pointed to Thomas Aquinas’s
five arguments for the existence of God, “one of which was to argue from
the design and complexity and order and pattern in the universe to the existence
of an ultimate intelligent designer.”

Intelligent design (ID) was on trial because it conflicts with Darwin’s
theory as taught in the classroom: Modern Darwinian evolution claims that the
unguided processes of random mutation and natural selection are sufficient
to explain the stunning features of living things, while intelligent design
claims there is evidence that some things are better explained by an intelligent
cause.

Haught slightly mischaracterized Thomas’s argument, which says nothing
about complexity per se. But Thomas certainly made a design argument by appealing
to features of the natural world, as do contemporary ID theorists. Despite
these similarities, however, some Thomists claim that Thomism is compatible
with Darwinian evolution and incompatible with intelligent design.

So which is it? Are Thomas’s writings a precursor to intelligent design,
as even design-critics like Haught claim; or is Darwin compatible with and
ID irreconcilable with Thomas’s philosophical and theological framework?
Or is there some third possibility? These are important questions, especially
for Catholics, because St. Thomas is the gold standard of Catholic thought—not
infallible, but highly trustworthy.

In a typical discussion of Darwinian evolution, Christian philosophy, and
intelligent design, one is likely to hear that St. Thomas had no problem with
secondary causes operating in nature and that St. Augustine knew that the Bible
is “not a science textbook.” Both of these assertions are true,
as far as they go. But unfortunately, such platitudes only obscure deeper sources
of tension between Darwinism and Thomistic thought. Here I would like to explore
three intimately related sources of tension: the problem of essences, the problem
of transformism, and the problem of formal causation.

The Essences of Species

First, the problem of essences. G. K. Chesterton once quipped that “evolution
. . . does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the
existence of man.” It might appear shocking, but in this one remark the
ever-perspicacious Chesterton summarized a serious conflict between classical
Christian philosophy and Darwinism.

In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to
a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or
essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and
cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a
crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature
from our sense experience of particular organisms.

Think about it: How is it that we are able to recognize different organisms
as belonging to the same group? The Aristotelian provides a good answer: It
is because species really exist—not as an abstraction in the sky, but
they exist nonetheless. We recognize the squirrel’s form, which it shares
with other members of its species, even though the particular matter of each
squirrel differs. So each organism, each unified whole, consists of a material
and immaterial part (form). (“Species” here is a more encompassing
concept than in modern biological definitions. For example, wolves and domesticated
dogs might share a common essence.)

One way to see this form-matter dichotomy is as Aristotle’s solution
to the ancient tension between change and permanence debated so vigorously
in the pre-Socratic era. Heraclitus argued that reality is change. Everything
constantly changes—like fire, which never stays the same from moment
to moment. Philosophers like Parmenides (and Zeno of “Zeno’s paradoxes” fame)
argued exactly the opposite; there is no change. Despite appearances, reality
is permanent. How else could we have knowledge? If reality constantly changes,
how can we know it? What is to be known?

Aristotle solved this dilemma by postulating that while matter is constantly
in flux—even now some somatic cells are leaving my body while others
arrive—an organism’s form is stable. It is a fixed reality, and
for this reason is a steady object of our knowledge. Organisms have an essence
that can be grasped intellectually.

Denial of True Species

Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet
as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality
altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into
any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle.
He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For
Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he
writes:

I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the
sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other,
and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which
is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again,
in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily,
for convenience’s sake.

Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder. This is
an extreme expression of the anti-Aristotelian (and anti-Thomist) philosophy
of nominalism. Nominalism (stemming from the Latin nomen, or “name”)
suggests that the individual is the only reality—not the universal, form,
or essence. The mind invents universals in order to group together similar
objects. But the universal is not a reality in which the individual in some
way participates.

But Thomas embraced form and, following Augustine, even maintained that a
creature’s form reflects the second member of the Trinity. For, “as
it [the creature] has a form and species, it represents the Word as the form
of the thing made by art is from the conception of the craftsman.”

The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of
true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because
the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the
true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral
Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter
in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really
just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the
Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only
a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes,
which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow.

What About Man?

Now we see Chesterton’s point. Man, the universal, does not really
exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton detested Darwinism because “it
abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of
ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not
believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only
a collection of somewhat similar individuals.

Classical notions of ethics were radically dependent upon this notion of
a real, knowable human nature. Aristotle and others often argued for what is
ethical in terms of what leads to human flourishing and fulfillment. Yet if
there is no human nature, how can we know what human fulfillment looks like
in general? Tim and Tom might, then, flourish under different moral codes.
Lack of a human nature may leave us with “different strokes for different
folks.”

As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre showed in After Virtue, the way
out of this modern dilemma is to recognize that if something’s nature
includes purposes or proper functions, then “ought” follows from “is.” For
if man is a certain sort of being, if he has a certain formal nature,
then there are facts about how man ought to behave. There are objective
criteria by which we can judge a human being good or bad. This kind of telos-infused
nature cannot be sustained by Darwinism, however, for Darwinism denies that
organisms have formal natures or are purposefully made.

But, the Darwinian will say, “We believe in function, too!” True,
the Darwinian knows of function—that ears hear, for example. But to say
in the Darwinian sense that the function of ears is to hear, notes philosopher
Lydia McGrew, is only to say that the information encoding ears was passed
to progeny because ears happened to hear—and that hearing, presumably,
gave these organisms some survival advantage. If, in 10,000 years, humans walk
on their hands because this somehow aids survival, the Darwinian cannot claim
that hands are meant for walking, only that hands in fact do walk
at this time. That is, the Darwinian cannot support the notion of proper function.

Implications for Bioethics

This is not a mere abstract point. This dilemma is playing itself out in
contemporary debates in bioethics. With whom are bioethicists like Leon Kass
(neo-Aristotelian and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics)
sparring today if not with thoroughgoing Darwinians like Princeton’s
Peter Singer, who denies that humans, qua humans, have intrinsic
dignity? Singer even calls those who prefer humans to other animals “speciesist,” which
in his warped vocabulary is akin to racism.

What justifies the excessive expense and effort required to keep a baby with
Down syndrome alive? For the traditionalist, it is the baby’s membership
in the human species. This gives the baby intrinsic value. For the utilitarian
like Singer, such expense is not justified; one would do better to
contribute to the World Wildlife Fund, for species’ differences are not
essential but accidental. As Singer notes,

All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. . . . He showed in the 19th
century that we are simply animals. Humans had imagined we were a separate
part of Creation, that there was some magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s
theory undermined the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking
about the place of our species in the universe.

If one must choose between saving an intelligent, fully developed pig or
a Down syndrome baby, Singer thinks we should opt for the pig. Perhaps this
is why natural law theorist J. Budziszewski writes, “If any contemporary
scientific movement holds promise for the furtherance of the natural law tradition,
it is not the stale dogma of natural selection, but frank recognition of natural
design.”

No Essential Differences?

The second conflict is very similar to the first. The Thomist, as we have
seen, is committed to the reality of universals, for universals are the objects
of higher knowledge. But it is not only the existence of species that Darwinism
destroys; it is also their stability.

Darwinian theory posits that all living things are related through one or
very few ancestors via solely material processes. This is known as “Universal
Common Ancestry.” But if living things have unchangeable essences, how
can these living things change (or “transform”) into other living
things through mere material causes?

Mark Ryland, a Thomist who is not an ID proponent, put it this way to a gathering
of the American Maritain Association in 2006:

For those defending at least some aspects of the classical idea of essences, the
problem can be stated as follows: how can one kind of living substance with
its own unique essence change into another kind? And beyond the how, why
would this happen in the natural world? What intrinsic end or ends would
it serve?

For Darwin, there was no problem to solve, for there are no essential differences
between living things. We see this assumption at work in every new primatological
study finding that apes have an inner mental life, use sign language, or form
hierarchical social structures “just like we do!” The Thomist should
see this as hyperbolic, for his starting point is our everyday experience of
the world. And as David Berlinski sardonically observes, the first and most
obvious fact about apes is that they are “behind the bars of their cages
and we are not.” Put plainly, “beyond what we have in common with
the apes, we have nothing in common, and while the similarities are interesting,
the differences are profound.”

Stable Realities

We should not be too flippant about this, however. No doubt, apes’ capacities
are more similar to ours than are, say, alpacas’. But sometimes these
similarities serve to hide real transitional difficulties. British literary
critic A. N. Wilson gives a fine example from his atheist days:

A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we
laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed
Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: “It
is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish
between one another by giving names.”

This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing
in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved,” like
finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter
rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human
beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations?
How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the
amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole
grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime
and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one
of the many phenomena—of which love and music are the two strongest—which
suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.

For the Darwinian, complex biological realities exist for the sake of their
smaller units of composition. Richard Dawkins has gone so far as to suggest
that we are the pawns of our selfish genes. In this view, biological reality
is a continuum, and the smallest units of composition run the show. Species’ differences
are mere accidents of environment and mutation.

But for Thomas, “the elements are for the sake of the compounds, the
compounds for the sake of living things.” That is, reality is decidedly
discontinuous, hierarchical, and top-down. The entire point of essences is
that they are stable realities; they cannot change and thus can provide real
knowledge. The differences between species (intelligible essences) are differences
of kind. Thus, those defending the tradition of natural philosophy
found in Aristotle and St. Thomas simply cannot accept transformism—at
least not without introducing teleological conceptions that transform Darwinian
theory itself.

What Does God Do?

Finally, before moving to consider intelligent design, there is the problem
of formal causation. It is here that we find St. Thomas’s unique contribution,
illuminating the insights of Aristotle with the light of Christian knowledge.

St. Thomas argued against the Islamic scholars of his day who held that God
is the direct cause of everything in nature, a view known as occasionalism.
Put negatively, occasionalism denies that creatures exercise their own causal
powers. It is God who always acts as the only cause; creatures only
appear to cause effects. “On the contrary,” as Thomas is fond of
saying, God created creatures with real natures that have real powers. Thus,
ants act in an ant-like fashion. Ants themselves cause effects.

God is, of course, also a true cause of ant behavior: He created ants, he
sustains ants in being, and he concurs (co-operates) with every ant action.
According to Notre Dame philosopher Alfred Freddoso, this last aspect was extremely
important to medieval Aristotelians: “It cannot be emphasized enough
that the position being rejected here (viz., that God’s action in the
world is exhausted by creation and conservation) is regarded as too weak by
almost all medieval Aristotelians. . . .” These medieval thinkers would
be scandalized by the claims of modern Christian thinkers who exclude God from
nature except as the First Cause and as having a merely bureaucratic role as
sustainer of the universe.

So Thomas believed in true secondary causes. In a certain sense, it is true
that God causes everything. But in the act of creation, God also delegates
to creatures the power to act as true causes of their creaturely behavior,
according to their natures. Because Aristotle is so well known for recognizing
teleology intrinsic to living things, and because Thomas is so well
known for this view of secondary causation, some Thomists think that their
tradition can wholeheartedly embrace Darwinian evolution. After all, Darwin
just claimed that nature is due to secondary causes, right? Nature just “does
its own thing.” It is this drastic over-simplification that lies at the
heart of the casual acceptance of Darwinism among some classically thinking
people today. We must dig deeper.

Exemplar Causes

Recall that for Thomas, creatures are a combination of form and matter. The
question that must be answered, then, in any version of Thomistic evolution,
is where form comes from. Darwin, denying Aristotelian essentialism, saw organisms’ traits
as accidental properties of living things that change with the winds of time.
Not so St. Thomas.

In his recent book Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes, Catholic
University philosophy professor Gregory T. Doolan gives the most extensive
treatment to date of Thomas’s notion of “exemplar causation,” an
integral part of Thomas’s metaphysics.

What is an exemplar cause? It is a type of formal cause—a sort of blueprint,
the idea according to which something is organized. For Thomas, these ideas
exist separately from the things they cause. For instance, if a boy is going
to build a soapbox derby car, the idea in his mind is separate from the form
of the car; yet the car’s form expresses the idea, or exemplar cause,
in the boy’s mind. Exemplar causes actually do something. They
are “practical ideas,” writes Doolan.

For Thomas—and here is the important point—a creature’s
form comes from a similar form in the divine intellect. In other
words, the cause of each species’ form is extrinsic. In fact,
writes Thomas, “God is the first exemplar cause of all things.” Creatures
do possess the causal powers proper to the nature God has granted them, but
creatures most certainly do not possess the power to create the form
of their or any other species.

For instance, frog parents have the proper ability to generate tadpoles.
They are able to bring out the natural form that is present in the potentiality
of matter. However, the frog parents cannot create the form “frog.” After
all, Thomas reasons, if frog parents could create the form “frog” they
would be the creators of their own form, and this is clearly a contradiction.
Natural things can generate forms of the same species, but they cannot create the
form of a species in general.

Thus, natural agency is not eliminated, yet God is still actively involved
in nature. Specific forms originate and reside in his mind, though God allows
creatures the dignity of acting in this creative drama. Still, Thomas is careful
to note that while secondary causes are real, “God . . . can cause an
effect to result in anything whatsoever independently of middle causes.”

By now it should be clear how different Thomas’s philosophy of nature
is from Darwinism. Rather than form being a merely apparent reality that can
be molded into any other form, for Thomas form originates in God’s mind.
He directly creates it. It is a forethought, not an afterthought. Species,
then, come to be because of his will and power (either successively or all
at once). They are neither the product of a trial-and-error process of natural
selection nor the mere intrinsic unfolding of secondary causes. Secondary causes
have their place, but they are inherently impotent to create novel form.

Let’s face it: Thomas Aquinas was not an evolutionist, let alone a
Darwinist, in any sense.

Three Misperceptions & Four Causes

Given the active role of God in nature in Thomas’s system, one might
think today’s Thomists would encourage the pursuit of signs of intelligent
design in nature. Yet in recent years, some Thomists have shied away from ID.
They do so not only because of lax scrutiny of the tensions just discussed
but also because of three major misperceptions of intelligent design: first,
that ID is “mechanistic”; second, that ID is a “God of the
Gaps” theory; and third, that ID is inherently “interventionist.” While
many Thomists harbor doubts about the more extravagant claims of Darwinian
science, taken together these three factors make it almost impossible for some
Thomists to embrace intelligent design. That is as unnecessary as it is unfortunate.

One of the defining hallmarks of modern Thomism is its strong rejection of
early modern philosophy as seen in René Descartes and Francis Bacon.
In general, modernists reduce Aristotle’s four causes down to only two
causes and, as a result, reduce all knowledge to empirical knowledge. Both
moves strike directly at Thomistic philosophy, so it is no surprise that they
have aroused Thomists’ ire.

“Causes” in Aristotle’s sense explain why something is
the way it is, and as Thomas explains, “there are four kinds of cause,
namely, the material, efficient, formal and final.” Aristotle and Thomas
would explain a marble statue by reference to its material cause (the marble),
its efficient cause (the sculptor), its formal cause (the shape of the statue),
and its final cause (the purpose of honoring Athena). A modernist, in contrast,
sees only material man and marble at work. Ultimately, all is explained by
atoms in motion—not by immaterial ideas, forms, or purposes. Thus for
the modernist, knowledge is necessarily and exclusively knowledge of the empirical.

Some Thomists insist that ID is methodologically flawed because, they claim,
ID, like modernism, rejects formal and final causation. This is incorrect.
Far from rejecting final causation, ID theorists see ID as finding empirical
evidence of purpose or teleology, for they see some features of nature as inexplicable
apart from intelligent activity such as foresight and planning.

By reintroducing intelligent causes as a legitimate scientific pursuit, and
by rejecting the Darwinian notion that material and efficient causes suffice
to explain nature, ID theorists may well open the door for renewed attention
to formal causes. Thomists should welcome ID as a partner.

Agency, Not Mechanism

Still, some Thomists insist that ID inherently views nature mechanistically.
Those who say this consistently have in mind Michael Behe’s argument
for the “irreducible complexity” of what are referred to in the
scientific literature as “molecular machines.” They seem to forget
that Thomas repeatedly used analogies between living objects and man-made artifacts.
So they should hardly be offended that Behe would compare some aspects of
microbiological structures to machines.

Besides, ID arguments propose the very opposite of mechanism—agency.
Consider Stephen Meyer’s argument concerning the informational content
of DNA. In Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that blind material
causes are insufficient to produce the immaterial information content
of DNA. An immaterial mind, Meyer claims, is a better explanation
than any mindless, material cause.

Some Thomist critics go one step further and claim that ID concedes a modernist,
Enlightenment view of science. Perhaps this is because ID proponents insist
that ID arguments fall within the domain of natural science. But this criticism
has things precisely backward: ID theorists challenge the Enlightenment notion
that only matter matters, that science cannot take immaterial concepts like
mental causation seriously. ID challenges this directly, noting that while
materialist science may have seemed plausible in the age of steam, it is hardly
plausible in today’s world of the information super-highway—run
on the power of the invisible and the immaterial. According to ID theorists,
accounting for nature in all its richness requires that we appeal not just
to material but to personal causes as well.

Moreover, the claim that design is empirically detectable concedes nothing
to the modernist idea that reason is limited to the empirical realm. Nor does
anything in ID imply that only science can provide real knowledge. One can
argue for empirical evidence of design and also defend, say, knowledge of divine
revelation, moral knowledge, knowledge of abstract essences, and knowledge
derived from philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

Not a “Gaps” Argument

The second confusion regards the claim that intelligent design is a “God
of the Gaps” argument. As Thomist Edward Feser writes, “Aquinas
does not argue in this lame ‘God of the gaps’ manner.
. . . Paley did, and ‘Intelligent Design’ theorists influenced
by him do as well.” Expressed more formally, a “gaps” argument
is known as an argument from ignorance. These arguments base claims upon what
one does not know rather than upon what one does know.
Critics misconstrue contemporary ID arguments (and perhaps Paley’s as
well) as, “I do not know how this feature of the natural world
arose via material causes; therefore, God did it!”

Yet this, too, is simply a misunderstanding. ID is not an argument for God’s
existence. Rather, it is an inference to an intelligent cause. Some people
think ID theorists are being coy, but they just want to avoid overstating their
argument. Thomas drew the same distinction in Summa Contra Gentiles:

For seeing that natural things run their course according to a fixed order,
and since there cannot be order without a cause of order, men, for the most
part, perceive that there is one who orders the things that we see. But who
or of what kind this cause of order may be, or whether there be but one,
cannot be gathered from this general consideration.

So there’s certainly nothing anti-Thomistic in distinguishing between
a generic argument for design and an argument for God’s existence—even
if the former might provide evidence for the latter.

Effects That Come from Minds

Furthermore, ID—whether true or false—is not an argument from
ignorance. ID proponents argue from the known features of natural objects,
the known causal capacities of minds in our everyday experience,
and the known limits of certain material causes. In fact, this is the same
method that makes Thomism so appealing. Experience teaches us that some effects
in our everyday observation of the cause-and-effect structure of the world
always come from minds. Material causes simply do not suffice to explain some
things.

If, for instance, I come home and find that the magnetic letters on the refrigerator
say “I love daddy,” I know that a mind rather than material causes
alone (e.g., strong winds blowing through the kitchen window) produced the
message. I already have numerous experiences with written language; I know
the limits of material causes in this arena. ID merely formalizes this common
experience with analytic rigor.

Take Stephen Meyer’s argument mentioned previously. Meyer argues that
DNA, which contains the same semantic quality as human language, also comes
from a mind. He surveys today’s most prominent materialistic theories
for the origin of DNA’s specified complexity and concludes that they
lack the causal resources to explain this salient property of DNA. But intelligent
agency does not. Thus, judged by standard modes of reasoning in the historical
sciences, intelligent agency is a better explanation.

The form of Meyer’s argument is precisely the same as Darwin’s.
(Darwin learned it from Sir Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology.)
The method involves looking to presently operating causes to explain past events
in natural history. DNA is often called a “code,” and if Meyer
is correct, the metaphor runs deeper than materialist philosophy ever dreamt.

Let the Evidence Decide

Finally, as we have already seen, in arguing against the occasionalists St.
Thomas affirmed that God has given nature causal capacities of its own. They
are bounded, of course, by certain actions of which only God is capable, but
nature has its role nonetheless. And this fact has led some Thomists to an
aesthetic preference for scientific theories that do not involve God’s “interference” in
nature. They are wary of ID’s seeming “interventionism.”

Whereas materialists must be non-interventionists, theists have more explanatory
resources at their disposal. Thus, it seems that the evidence should decide
the matter for theists. Perhaps it is logically possible that God limited himself
to secondary causes in natural history, but we cannot deduce that beforehand.
If the fossil record remains discontinuous despite the occasional media hype
over a new “missing link,” and if field studies of natural selection
continue to show that natural selection merely keeps populations healthy, then
so be it. Maybe God acted as a primary cause at different periods in life’s
history.

Christians already believe this. They recite it every time they
say the creed. As Avery Cardinal Dulles—an advocate for teleological
evolution—wrote:

Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic
colleagues. They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of
emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians
must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this
fashion. . . . [God] raised Jesus from the dead. If God is so active in the
supernatural order, producing effects that are publicly observable, it is
difficult to rule out on principle all interventions in the process of evolution.
Why should God be capable of creating the world from nothing but incapable
of acting within the world he has made?

No Commitment Necessary

For Christians, this is surely a needed warning against swallowing popular
prejudices. But even so, is the ID proponent necessarily committed to God’s
repeated intervention in the natural world? Absolutely not. Postulating intelligent
agency as a necessary causal ingredient for certain features of nature does
not commit one to exactly when or how those features arrived
on the scene. Recall the letters on my refrigerator: I cannot be certain who
put them there, or how, or when, but I surely know that the arrangement was
intelligently designed.

Catholic biochemist and ID proponent Michael Behe, for one, thinks it unlikely
that God intervened directly in the development of the biological realm. Rather,
he speculates that God may have front-loaded the information and laws necessary
for humanity’s development into the beginning of the universe. Behe thinks
that

the assumption that design unavoidably requires “interference” rests
mostly on a lack of imagination. There’s no reason that the extended
fine-tuning view . . . necessarily requires active meddling with nature.
. . . One simply has to envision that the agent who caused the universe was
able to specify from the start not only laws, but much more.

Intelligent design by natural laws and initial specifications is still intelligent
design, and it may be detectable in the same way that the “fine-tuning” of
the laws of physics are detectable. The detectable effects of intelligent design
could be the same, no matter how that design was implemented.

But Thomas himself, far from being worried about intervention, thought there
was good reason to think that God purposefully “intervenes” in
nature, writing that

the divine power [can] at times work apart from the order assigned by God
to nature, without prejudice to His providence. In fact He does this sometimes
to manifest His power. For by no other means can it better be made manifest
that all nature is subject to the divine will, than by the fact that sometimes
He works independently of the natural order: since this shows that the order
of things proceeded from Him, not of natural necessity, but of His free will.

Thomas’s way of speaking here is more helpful than speaking of “intervention,” which
is often used pejoratively. In Thomas’s view, when God acts directly
in nature, he is not invading foreign territory, tampering with something he
should have fixed earlier, or violating natural laws established in opposition
to his will. He is acting within the world that he created and that he sustains
from moment to moment. If he sometimes chooses to act independently of the
natural order, to bring about results that would not have happened if nature
were left to its own devices, that is his prerogative. Thus, Thomists who decry “interventionism” may
not be as Thomistic as they think.

Compatible Spheres

Still, St. Thomas’s argumentation differs at times from modern design
arguments. For one thing, Thomas is more concerned with ontology than biology.
His chief concern is why something should exist at all, not the intricate features
of particular biological organisms. For another, Thomas preferred deductive
arguments. ID proponents prefer newer forms of argumentation, especially “inference
to the best explanation”—the method common in the historical sciences,
whereby one must not only weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a given hypothesis
but also compare hypotheses with each other. In this fashion, a scientist can
decide which theory currently explains the data better than all rivals and
yet remain open to new data or hypotheses that might change the equation.

While they don’t provide the certainty of deductive conclusions, one
advantage to these arguments is that they recognize that this finite world
often requires trade-offs: One cannot sit satisfied having raised questions
about an ID argument; rather, he must show that his own hypothesis is better at
explaining the relevant data.

As Alexander Pruss, an analytical Thomist and former Georgetown colleague
of John Haught, writes, “On the compatibility between Thomism and ID,
the answer is surely positive. Thus, one might think that the irreducible complexity
types of arguments provide a strong probabilistic case for design and that
the existence of teleology provides a sound deductive argument for a first
cause.”

Despite the different subject matter and styles of argumentation, Thomists
and ID theorists have, as we have seen, much in common. The dismissal
of intelligent design by some contemporary Thomists is unfortunate. For if
reality is a unified whole, that is, if it stems from the divine mind, as Thomas
believed, would it not be odd if good philosophy concluded that life was designed
but good science concluded that it was not? •

Logan Paul Gage is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Baylor University. He and his wife Elizabeth attend St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Waco, Texas. A version of this essay appears in the recently released book God and Evolution (Discovery Institute Press), edited by Jay W. Richards.

Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.